my neighborhood

We're leaving Mombasa in 2 days and we won't be back here for about a month. In a month we'll be doing our urban homestays, and we met our families yesterday. My host mother said that I'm to think of her as my mom here in Mombasa. She said she and her daughters will speak only swahili to me so that I'll learn well, and also that they'll bring me to lots of Muslim weddings as soon as Ramadan finishes. She lives in old town (or mji wa kale), which is where we're staying now. i'm excited about that because this already feels like my neighborhood; I know a bunch of the vendors on our street because they love to help us with our swahili; on my way over to this cyber cafe, we got into a discussion with Cappuccino, a tour guide who knows a bunch of people on our program by name already, and he taught us how to say "we're going to the cyber cafe" (tunaenda wa cybercafe). Giraffe has a shop at the other end of the block and told us this morning that if we had any questions about the language, we were to come see him.

This morning we split up into pairs and went on a scavenger hunt kind of thing to try to find a place in the city, and we asked a man on the street where to find coast General Hospital once we were completely lost. He was a really nice guy named Omari who took us on a shortcut (i was suspicious...you don't do this in NYC. ever.) through old town and sat at the hospital with us for a while, teaching us swahili words and telling us about his job as a windsurfing instructor. Then he walked all the way back with us and he pointed us back to our road and gave us his cell phone number in case we wanted to keep in touch.

In Swahili class, we've learned the present and future tense, and it's an amazing language; it's so much fun, and it's also really easy. Next week we're doing homestays in a village and having swahili lessons and also cooking classes. The food here is great, and the coastal specialty is fish grilled coconut and lemon. The bones are treacherous, though.